Clos du Gravillas: memories written in grapes and gravel

I can’t remember now where I came across it, but I once read something about wine being the memory of the season, of the rain, the sun and the wind, and of each change in the weather in each day of a grape’s short life. The expression of that memory, this person wrote so eloquently, is what makes good, natural wine–wine that is primarily made in the vineyard, rather than the wine cellar–distinctly different.

This impression that the grape is almost like a writing instrument that can capture and express memories of a season, almost like a writer can make meaning of an experience through words, came to mind when I went to meet the owners of Clos du Gravillas. John and Nicole Bojanowski are a young Franco-American couple that have been making organic, natural wine since 1996 in southwestern France’s Minervois region. Their approach to winemaking has a definite literary feel to it.

Start with their website, which has a quote from Voltaire (“Il faut savoir cultiver son jardin,” or “You need to know how to take care of your garden”) smack dab at the top of the site’s homepage. Several of their wines’ have names that come from songs: “Pour un peu de tendresse” from Jacques Brel, and “Rendez-vous du Soleil” from the Charles Trénet (like Nicole from Narbonne) song Le Soleil et La Lune. Their website also contains this interesting observation: “Wine is about as close as agriculture gets to art.” I neglected to inquire about the origin of that last citation, and an Internet search didn’t find any attribution for it—other than their website, so it wouldn’t surprise me if one of these two lovers of words was the author of this provocative phrase. A winemaker as artist… Why not? Certainly winemakers, like artists, put their personal stamp on their wine. [Editor's note: following the publication of this article, I found out that the "Wine is about as close as agriculture gets to art" quote is by John Bojanowski.]

John, the American part of this couple, grew up in Kentucky, where whiskey not wine is made, and went to school at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island. He majored in literature, but decided, after penning a short novel as part of his graduate thesis assignment, that he needed “more life experience” if he was going to get anywhere as a writer. Before graduating in 1987, he spent a semester abroad, studying in Poland. He told me that his European experience was enjoyable, but that, with a $400-a-month school loan to pay off, he couldn’t afford to teach English in Poland for $100 a month. Instead, he managed to land a job as East European Sales Manager with a young, but rapidly growing Rhode Island-based company called American Power Conversion.

APC soon had a major share of the uninterruptible power supply equipment market throughout Eastern Europe. “It was easy selling our equipment,” he said modestly. “The only competition was from some Taiwanise companies, and their products weren’t anywhere near as good as ours.

“In fact,’ he told me with a slightly nostalgic grin, “selling that power equipment was much easier than selling wine.” And, not surprisingly to anyone who knows the finances of most small, family-run vineyards, it turns out that the job with APC, which is now part of the French-based international electrical group Schneider Electric, was undoubtedly more financially rewarding than winemaking. The stock options that he received as one of the early APC employees helped he and his wife to purchase Clos du Gravillas.

The couple met in the early 1990s when an APC regional manager for France, who happened to be from Narbonne, introduced the two of them to each other. Deciding in 1994 that she wanted to learn how to make wine, Nicole enrolled in a year-and-a-half-long agricultural program. She followed that with an internship harvesting grapes in 1996 with the man who is known among carignan grape admirers as “The Pope of Carignan,” Sylvain Fadat of Domaine d’Aupilhac in Montpeyroux. In 1997 she harvested grapes at a second well-known vineyard, this time in Burgundy at the Domaine Méo-Camuzet in Vosne-Romanée.

Wanted: blinding white rock
Both of the vineyards where she interned, she said, have had an enormous influence on their winemaking style at Clos du Gravillas. Even beyond trying to emulate a type of wine, they set out searching for a property to buy with a specific terroir in mind. One of the essential elements of terroir is soil, and they specifically wanted, as she explained it, “blinding white rock like that found at Aupihac and Vosne Romanée.” Areas with such rocks are quite rare in France,” she explained. They had located an interesting property in the Roussillon, with white granite on it, but felt that it would be better to be closer to Narbonne, where her family lives.

They finally settled on St. Jean de Minervois. Gravillas means “gravel” in the local patois, and the white limestone gravel plateau that the Clos du Gravillas is located on has been used to grow grapes for hundreds if not thousands of years. The property also met their desire to have some elevation under the grapevines, lifting them up towards the Montagne Noire, or Black Mountains, that run just north of them. Being situated between an elevation of 210 and 300 meters (approximately 690 to 985 feet) means that they catch the cool evening breezes, allowing the grapes to retain more of their acidity. The high summer temperatures of this region during the day add the necessary alcohol to balance the acidity, creating the structural depth and maximum grape ripeness required to make excellent wine.

They started in 1996 by planting Syrah, Cabernet and Mourvèdre, but things got interesting in 1999, the same year that they started making wine, when they discovered 2.5 ha (a little over 6 acres) of Carignan planted between 1911 and 1970 and a small parcel of old Grenache Gris vines. This discovery is the key to the two stars of the Clos du Gravillas, Lo Vièlh and L’inattendu.

The Carignan of Lo Vièlh is a profound red, but with a transparency not often found in wine made from this grape variety. The wine is aged in 400-liter barrels made from oak trees harvested in central France’s Allier forest. This tightly-grained Allier oak is known to produce more elegant wine than medium-grained wood from other French oak forests, such as the one in Nevers, and this is a good example of that mysterious alchemy. There’s a nice assortment of the characteristic carignan dark fruit, spice and licorice flavors in Lo Vièlh. The 2005 that I tasted had a remarkable velvety balance with a fresh finish that seems to go on and on. Truly a distinctive wine and one that should go some way to silencing Carignan critics who refuse to acknowledge that excellent wine can be made from this grape.

Wine from high-yield Carignan grapes made up a good part of the 100-plus liters of wine consumed, on the average, by each person in France in the 1970s. With French wine consumption less than half of that number these days and the EU firmly committed to draining Europe’s “wine lake,” vast tracts of Carignan have been uprooted. From 1990 to 2002, total world acreage of carignan was reduced almost in half, from over 500,000 acres down to 290,400 acres. In The Oxford Companion to Wine, author Jancis Robinson, the Simon Cowell of wine criticism—somewhat acerbic, but usually on target with a barb, said of Carignan, “Its wine is high in everything—acidity, tannins, colour, bitterness—but finesse and charm. This gives it the double inconvenience of being unsuitable for early consumption yet unworthy of maturation.”

Heretics unite!
The American half of the Bojanowski winemaking couple thought that such disparaging words about the grape that they were staking their domaine on necessitated a response. So almost exactly five years ago—on July 26, 2004 to be exact, he organized the first “Carignan Renaissance” in Béziers. “The intent,” he explains, “was to make people aware that Carignan is a vine of terroir, a cépage of character that, when treated with nobility, returns the flavor.” A total of 24 Carignans from France, California, Spain and South Africa were gathered for the first “Carignan World Tasting.” The 11 Carignanistas present in the tasting room must have felt somewhat like the Cathars who barricaded themselves inside Béziers’ churches after the Catholic forces in the Albigensian Crusade made their city, a Languedoc stronghold of Catharism, the first target in the campaign to exterminate what the church had labeled a heretical faith. These vignerons made out better than the Cathars, who were exterminated 800 years ago on July 22, 1209.

Many of the wines tasted by the 23 professional tasters in attendance, several of them well-known British wine journalists, including Robinson, received good marks. Several of these writers (not Robinson, unfortunately) said that the tasting had changed their minds about Carignan. Even Robinson admitted that: “Seriously old carignan vines can produce concentrated, characterful wine if yields are not too high and the terroir is interesting.” Which is, in a way, what the Bojanowskis and other winemakers making Carignan varietal Vin de Pays wine or blending it with other varieties are saying.

And 100% Carignan wine does seem to be experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Part of it just might be the worldwide movement towards indigenous grape varieties, part of it might be the trend towards more natural, terroir-driven wines, and part of it might just be that France loves an underdog (think of Jerry Lewis).

The other exceptional wine that the Bojanowskis are making from that amazing 2.5-ha parcel of old vines is a combination of the old-vine Grenache Gris and some Grenache Blanc. Aptly named L’Inattendu, or the “Unexpected,” this dry white AOC Minervois has been called “a sort of rosé manqué” in that the vinification is similar to that of a rosé, but the result is a white wine. After a light pressing, the grape must is chilled and allowed to settle naturally. From there the juice goes into Allier oak barrels, where it stays for 12 months resting on the fine lees. Dry and rich, with a good balance of green apple and mineral flavors, and an elegant mouth feel, L’Inattendu is perfect for accompanying a fish dish or even a strong cheese.

They make other good wines at Clos du Gravillas, like that Charles Trénet-inspired Carignan, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah blend, Le Rendez-vous du Soleil. Perhaps not as refined as the old-vine, 100% Carignan Lo Vièlh, Le Rendez-vous du Soleil has other attributes such as freshness, spicy garrigue and cranberry flavors, and the aroma of red plums and lavender.

Lifestyle with substance
When I asked John Bojanowski if the writing that he had studied at Brown University still called to him, he replied that the thought occurs to him on an almost daily basis. “When I finished my novel/thesis, my conclusion was that I could (emphasis his) do it, but that I hadn’t seen anything to describe (like Hemingway described so well)… So I needed to travel and to see and meet people. I’m still traveling and seeing, and writing about one’s life is usually a first-novel thing. But that’s for when I really get the urge. For now, we’re just trying to understand wine and vines, and grapes, and French people, and Kentucky people, and taking it one day at a time.”

I believe him when he says that one day he’ll put down the words of his experience, and I know that it will be a book worth reading. In the meantime, he’s writing with the memory of his grapes and the gravelly terroir of Clos du Gravillas. Funny that he should mention Hemingway, as I see their Lo Vièlh (which means “The Old One” in occitan) as sort of like a Hemingway novel (maybe The Old Man and the Sea); straightforward and understated in its elegance, with a strong masculine personality that isn’t afraid to stand up to its critics. And I wouldn’t hesitate to compare L’Inattendu to an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, maybe even his best known and arguably finest work, The Great Gatsby. For in its mineral complexity, this white wine is extraordinarily beautiful, with an intricate, complex taste. At the same time, just as Fitzgerald’s novel portrayed the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, L’Inattendu goes beyond the average white wine in its elegant, rich, slightly oxidized taste.

Nicole and John Bojanowski set out to make grand vin, and I think that they’ve achieved that goal. Their annual production is only 20,000 bottles, as the yields on their 6-ha vineyard are kept around 25 hl per hectare through severe pruning and lots of spring and summer work on each individual vine. So if you want to get your hands on one of these “classics” you’ll have to make an effort. And a well worthwhile effort it will be.

Tagged as: Languedoc, Minervois